When Women Feminist Reforms in the 1970s Cheri Register On September 19, 1970, a group called Women Against Male Supremacy (WAMS) picketed a fash-

ion show in downtown Minneapolis. The problem was not the fashions but the failure of the show’s sponsor, the Star and Tribune Company, to “desexegate” its newspapers’ classi-

fied job listings. WAMS had sought since January to persuade the company to comply with the State Act Against Discrimination and federal Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines set in 1968.1 Despite pickets at the papers’ headquarters, costumes made of want ads, stickers on newspaper vending boxes, and a meeting with management, the ads still read “Help Wanted–Male” and “Help Wanted–Female.”

An account of the protest in the Female Liberation Newsletter includes this “funny incident”: “A little girl wanted to know what we were doing, so we told her and then gave her a sign to carry. Her mother (laughingly) said, ‘Don’t do it! Her father will kill her! He’s [Star and Tribune columnist] Jim Klobuchar!’ ” 2 The author of the account, Phyllis Kahn, was elected two years later to

Minneapolis Tribune’s report on Woman Power Day, covering national as well as local events, August 27, 1970 62 Minnesota History

Publication of this article was supported, in part, by the Eugenie M. Anderson Women in Public Affairs Fund.

Went Public the Minnesota House of Representatives, becoming one of an unprece­ dented six female legislators. She serves there still, among 43 women in a body of 134. In 2006 the “little girl,” Amy Klobuchar, became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. Neither feat would have been likely without the consciousness-raising, organizing, demonstrating, and lobbying that made the 1970s, in the words of University of Minnesota history professor Sara M. Evans, the “golden years” of the women’s movement.3 Changes wrought in that decade opened virtually all arenas of civic life to women. Minnesota became a national proving ground for feminist reforms. The first battered women’s shelter in the country was established here, as well as the first pay equity program in public employment. Minnesota’s high rate of volunteerism and the bipartisan civility of its machine-free government made the passage of citizen initiatives into law an achievable goal. Decades later, it is well worth examining how Minnesota women affected landmark changes that we may today take for granted.

“Don’t iron while the strike is hot!” Three weeks before the WAMS protest, on August 26, 1970, women had massed in downtown Minneapolis to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted

Minneapolis’s Foshay Tower, decked out for Woman Power Day, 1970

them the right to vote. The National Organization for Women (NOW) urged women to skip work and household tasks that day: “Don’t iron while the strike is hot!” In response, the Women’s Advisory Committee to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights organized “Woman Power Day,” featuring leading local women giving speeches and workshops on employment, education, politics, youth, and economics. A sign of the times, the brochure listed, for example, future judge Diana Murphy, then president of the League of Women Voters, as “Mrs. Joseph Murphy, Jr.” 4 I headed downtown full of excitement. I knew of plans for guerrilla

theater and eating lunch “unaccompanied” in men-only dining rooms, chief among them Dayton’s Men’s Oak Grill. I kept my eye on the Foshay Tower, the city’s tallest building, and soon a bed-sheet banner unfurled from the observation deck, reading “WOMEN UNITE.” A selfstyled radical feminist of 25, I was skeptical of the program that the “nice ladies,” Republican Governor Harold LeVander’s appointees to the Women’s Advisory Committee, had designed. Indeed, the workshop on economic power focused on investment and banking. Where, I asked, were women to get money to invest if their jobs paid them an average of 57 cents to a man’s dollar? A panelist admonished me to be patient: “You young women are in such a hurry to get that fur coat.” Yet our encounter, and others that day, helped establish a symbiosis between nice ladies and radicals. As Nina Rothchild now describes it, “There was an understanding that you need people far out, rocking the boat, and then the nice ladies come in, and they’re solving a problem. In the meantime, you shift the center towards the direction you want to go.” 5 The nice ladies put on their power pantsuits and headed for the state capitol. The boat rock-

Cheri Register is a cofounder of the Emma Willard Task Force on Education and a pioneer in the field of women’s studies. A writer with several books in print, she teaches creative-nonfiction writing at the Loft Literary Center.

Summer 2008 63

ers found ballast for their outrage in countercultural models of change: women’s health clinics, rape crisis centers, feminist theaters, and more.

EMPLOYMENT Vivian Jenkins Nelsen remembers that August 26 commemoration and wondering whether black suffragists would be duly celebrated, but she was too busy at her new job to attend. As director of financial assistance for the minority education program at Augsburg College, she was responsible for 52 students. Two other new hires—a man and a woman—joined her at the same rank in the same department. One day when her male colleague was away, Nelsen answered a phone call from a car dealership.

The caller was checking whether the man worked full-time. “And does he make $12,000?” “I hope to hell not,” Nelsen blurted and hung up. She told her female colleague, who, like her, earned $9,000, and they figured he had inflated his salary to get financing. Weeks later when one of her students—Syl Jones, now an editorial columnist for the Star Tribune—discovered that Augsburg’s few faculty women earned less than their male counterparts, the phone call made sense. “We didn’t just leap off into the women’s movement,” Nelsen explains. “I took it like, well, they’re Lutheran and they don’t know any better. I was raised in a Lutheran church. I knew that it had been very shielded from people of color and such, so I cut them a little slack.” Later the

pay differential was explained at a faculty meeting: Men needed more money because they were heads of households. Nelsen, meanwhile, was the primary breadwinner while her husband looked for a job. “The nickel dropped,” she says, and the women filed a complaint in 1971.

Yet passage of a law did not guarantee enforcement. Surprise—disbelief—betrayal was a common sequence of reactions for working women who trusted in the 1963 Equal Pay Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to protect their interests. Yet passage of

The Narr ator s Eleven women, all active feminists in the 1970s, were interviewed for Each stands for scores more who also have much to tell.

Linda Bergli n , elected to the Min-

Carol Lacey, formerly a reporter

nesota House of Representatives in 1972 and now serving in the state Senate.

for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, now teaching at Metropolitan State University.

Mary Ann Grossmann, former

Vivian Jenkin s Nelsen , once

editor of the women’s pages of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, now the Pioneer Press book review editor.

state president of the Women’s Equity Action League, now the executive director of the Inter-Race Institute.

Paulette Joyer, former vice

Gerri Perreault, cofounder of

president of Minnesota Feminists for Life, now an attorney working with the elderly.

Phylli s Kahn, cofounder of the Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus, who has served in the state House of Representatives since 1972.

64 Minnesota History

the Emma Willard Task Force on Education, now Director of Leadership Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.

Nina Rothch ild, the first director

of the Minnesota Commission on the Economic Status of Women, now

this article.

retired but on the board of the Minnesota Women’s Consortium.

Emily Anne Staples Tuttle ,

chair of the first Minnesota Women’s Advisory Committee, elected to the state Senate in 1976, now serving on nonprofit boards.

Sharo n Rice Vaughan, member of Women’s Advocates and pioneer in securing justice for battered women, now an associate professor at Metropolitan State University.

Nancy Regist er Wange n, active in the statewide enforcement of equity in education, now retired from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities.

a law did not guarantee enforcement. Phyllis Kahn, a researcher in genetics and cell biology at the University of Minnesota, had filed a complaint about job status and pay with the university’s judiciary committee in 1968 that incited acts of retaliation. She appealed to the EEOC, only to have the complaint sit unsettled for a dozen years.6 Nelsen’s case moved along, however. She got involved in the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), which she calls “the legal arm of the women’s movement.” Attorney Ellen Dresselhuis, the local president, championed litigation. Minnesotan Arvonne Fraser, then known as the wife of Congressman Donald Fraser and founder of the D.C. chapter of WEAL, worked through channels in Congress with her WEAL colleague Bernice Sandler to get wording added to the Education Amendments of 1972.7 Title IX, as it came to be known, read, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity

receiving federal financial assistance.” Even Augsburg, a private religious college, fell under this rule. Nelsen moved to the University of Minnesota in 1972. The following year, researcher Shyamala Rajender filed a discrimination complaint against the chemistry department. WEAL offered assistance, and a law firm took the case as a class-action suit. The Rajender Decree, issued in 1980, standardized hiring practices at the university and awarded salary increases to covered female employees.8 The early high-profile discrimination cases tended to be in academe or at management levels of business, or they secured employment for the “first” in a traditionally male field. Later in the decade, conditions faced by working-class women in “female” jobs would come to the fore.

EDUCATION

Arvonne Fraser, who championed pay equity and equal opportunity in education, about 1970

Woman Power Day brought focus to my activism. Over lunch in the menonly section of Powers department store’s basement dining room, I got to know Gerri Helterline (later Perreault) from NOW.9 We both found speaking about women’s liberation to high-school classes on the “freakof-the-week circuit” to be redundant and ineffective. We wanted to reach younger children not yet socialized into stereotypical roles and to address inequities through revamped curricula and egalitarian classroom methods. We would eliminate the re-

quirement that girls take home economics and boys take industrial arts, include women in history texts and female writers in English courses, and encourage girls’ interest in science and athletics. By February 1971 we, with three like-minded women, formed the Emma Willard Task Force on Education, named for the founder of the nation’s first secondary school for girls.10 We laid out our concerns in a letter to Howard Casmey, the state commissioner of education, and copied Wenda Moore, an assistant to Governor Wendell Anderson.11 Moore arranged a meeting for us in the governor’s office with Don Hadfield, the Equal Opportunities officer in the Department of Education. The department had recently issued EDU 521, a mandate that all teachers take a course in human relations for certification or recertification. Although it was meant to raise awareness of racism, Hadfield would consider applying it to sexism. We continued to meet with him in a fashion peculiar to the time: Since “women’s libbers” aroused snickers in the halls of government, Hadfield served us doughnuts at his home. As a result, the Emma Willard Task Force presented EDU 521 workshops at every opportunity. Gerri Perreault learned to read the captive participants’ moods, and she preferred hostility to indifference: “It meant you might reach them, because at least they were engaged.” To enlarge our audience, we printed a collection of materials, Sexism in Education, in December 1971. Ten years later we were still filling orders from as far away as Australia. We learned strategy by trial and error. Perreault remembers an instance when bypassing an administrator to meet with more sympathetic staffers Summer 2008 65

made the man angry. “I learned to be more thoughtful about when I would do that,” she says, “because it could burn bridges.” We formed alliances with teachers like Mary Tjosvold, founder of Twin Cities-based Teachers for Change, and officials like Nina Rothchild of the Mahtomedi school board, who was organizing the few women on Minnesota school boards. Perreault, Tjosvold, and Rothchild went on to serve on a state task force convened in January 1974 to “eliminate sex bias in education.” 12 Inspired by the Emma Willard Task Force, Nancy Wangen, a former Hopkins High School English teacher, began organizing meetings on Title IX. Shortly, the district hired her to develop a policy. She first met with each school principal to examine the implications of the law. “In one of these interviews, the principal said to me after listening to my opening spiel, ‘Now what is this again?’ These were people who had some human rights training around the issue of race, but the issue of gender just wasn’t in the forefront. It was much more threatening because they didn’t have a lot of kids of color— hardly any, in fact—but, boy, did they have a lot of females.” Mary Peek was doing similar work in Mahtomedi, and by 1975 the two were in demand for contract work with districts around the state in danger of losing state funds unless they drew up com-

66 Minnesota History

League of Women Voters lobbyists waiting to testify, 1972

pliance plans. This “suburban mom” and “white-haired grandmother” quickly discovered how to persuade their audience—get the men to boast about their daughters.13 “They could see these things for their daughters even when it scared the daylights out of them to think about their wives,” Wangen says.

for a job in the Nixon administration. The meeting concluded with plans to organize a bipartisan National Women’s Political Caucus.15

POLITICS Legislation, once enforced, demonstrably changed behavior. Some women put to use lobbying skills learned in their work with the American Association of University Women, Junior League, or Planned Parenthood. At a special Women’s Day at the Capitol on February 2, 1971, we novices saw how frustrating it was to plead with uncomprehending male legislators. Electing women to office became paramount.14 In July 1971 Congresswomen Bella Abzug (New York), Shirley Chisholm (New York), and Patsy Mink (Hawaii) called a meeting to discuss women’s participation in politics. Among the women who turned out were Arvonne Fraser and Republican Emily Anne Staples, chair of Minnesota’s Women’s Advisory Committee, who was in Washington to interview

Poster, about 1982: “Women hold 43% of Minnesota out-of-the-home jobs, yet only 7% of its political jobs.”

Phyllis Kahn and Diane Fass of Rochester agreed to spearhead a Minnesota chapter and scheduled a rally over the lunch hour on August 26, 1971, at NSP Plaza in Minneapolis. Besides Fraser and Staples, State Democratic-Farmer-Labor Chairwoman Koryne Horbal and State

Republican Chairwoman Lu Stocker addressed the crowd. An organizing meeting in November proved somewhat contentious, especially over how broadly to define “political.” The riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, plus the lingering war in Vietnam, had left many feminists disenchanted with party politics. Party activists prevailed, however, and strengthened their resolve. An early draft of the bylaws says that the Minnesotan Women’s Political Caucus (MWPC) will “encourage” women to run for office.16 “Encourage” soon gave way to “recruit, support, and endorse.” The MWPC was by design nonpartisan, but women also sought greater influence within the parties. Following a 1971 study, “DFL Women: Present but Powerless,” Koryne Horbal and others drove from county to county, enrolling women in a group known by 1973 as the DFL Feminist Caucus. In June 1973 some 60 women, with Ann O’Loughlin’s leadership, formed the GOP Women for Political Effectiveness, renamed the GOP Feminist Caucus in 1975.17 Organizing bore fruit in the 1972 election. Five women—two Republicans and three Democrats—joined the lone female incumbent, DFLer Helen McMillan of Austin, in the state House of Representatives. Republican women had gathered in Emily Anne Staples’s living room, where Mary Forsythe of Edina announced her intent to run. Ernee McArthur of Brooklyn Center was the other victorious Republican. Staples herself was maneuvered out of party endorsement at the last minute. (Although the ballot did not identify legislative candidates by party, endorsement brought funds and volunteers.) When Staples was elected to the state Senate in 1976,

the DFL endorsed her.18 She had switched parties in 1973, one year after serving on the platform committee for a state GOP convention. “We put forward a platform that certainly supported the Equal Rights Amendment and freedom of choice for women. There was lots of wrangling on the floor and they did not pass either [one]. I think there were eight of us who at that point said, ‘I don’t think this is our party anymore.’” The GOP had begun a momentous shift to the right. A statewide reapportionment that created new districts with no incumbents benefited the three DFL winners. Linda Berglin claimed a new seat in South Minneapolis. When she learned that her district in Southeast Minneapolis was open, Phyllis Kahn became, she says, “a victim of my own rhetoric” and contemplated running. Her decision was sealed when her dean at the university told her that because of her discrimination complaint, he would not endorse her full request for research funds.

The campaign would draw on female networks: carpools, PTA, book clubs, coffee parties. A campaign that continues to draw national notice took place in Minnetonka, a Republican stronghold.19 Nancy Wangen, the DFL chairwoman in a district with no incumbent, was asked to run, but she had young children and a reputation as quite liberal. She suggested Joan Growe, whom she had met in the League of Women Voters. Wangen and Gretchen Fogo, another teacher taking time out to raise children, cochaired Growe’s campaign. “I remember the first meeting at Joan’s

State Senator Emily Staples, cutting a shamrock cake with DFL colleagues Nicholas Coleman and Edward J. Gearty, about 1978

house when we talked about strategy,” Wangen says, “and one of the men said, ‘Well, the first thing we need to do is a door-to-door canvass to find where the Democrats are.’ After they left, I said to Joan, ‘Scrub that.’ ” The campaign would draw on female networks: carpools, PTA, book clubs, coffee parties. Weekly meetings in the basement of St. Luke’s Presbyterian Church, with childcare, drew women with little experience in politics. “We had real tasks at those meetings. It wasn’t just come and stuff envelopes.” The campaign proved empowering for its core participants, several of whom went on to graduate or professional school. Because the GOP planned a vigorous campaign to unseat Growe in the 1974 election, she filed instead for secretary of state, an office never before held by a woman. She served there for 24 years.

Summer 2008 67

YOUTH Feminists were eager to see whether electing women would yield tangible results. Charlotte Striebel, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota, was one of the first to test the new legislators’ power. Striebel had already embarked on a crusade that would have dramatic consequences. Her daughter, Kathy, a swimmer, wanted the same opportunities her brother enjoyed, but her St. Paul junior high school offered no girls’ sports. Even after she rounded up enough others, the school refused to organize a girls’ swim team. St. Paul had just passed an ordinance prohibiting sex discrimination in education, so Striebel filed a grievance in 1971, and Kathy was admitted to the boys’ team. Interschool competition raised new obstacles, some of them humiliating.20 Striebel appealed to newly elected Phyllis Kahn, whom she had introduced to WAMS, and together they wrote a bill mandating coed sports until athletes reached the age when size and strength made a difference, and then equal access and funding for boys’ and girls’ teams. The law that passed in 1975 eliminated the coed requirement to achieve equal access for girls of all abilities and exempted gate receipts from the funding formula.21 Passage of the athletics bill is one of the greatest challenges Kahn has faced in her legislative ca-

68 Minnesota History

reer. “People feel very emotional,” she explains. “That was considered such a male province.” In a contest for symbols of change in the 1970s, a gleeful young woman pulling herself out of a swimming pool with strong arms, wearing an efficient tank suit, her hair slicked back like an otter’s, would be a strong contender.

Fair media coverage was as important to the women’s movement as political power. MEDIA Fair media coverage was as important to the women’s movement as political power. The mainstream media’s preference for sideshow appeal—most famously, spurious bra-burnings—made substantive reporting tricky to achieve. Gerri Perreault points out that when she dropped her married name, the story made page one—above the fold—in a paper that never covered the work of the Emma Willard Task Force. The late syndicated columnist Molly Ivins worked briefly at the Minneapolis Tribune and was a familiar presence at feminist gatherings. In 1970 she attended a meeting of

“dissident overground journalists” that discussed two strategies for deepening the coverage: “Many of us agreed that rather than writing about Women’s Liberation, we should start writing about the reasons why there is such a movement—start writing about salary discrimination, limitation of opportunities for advancement . . . and about a zillion other subjects.” The second strategy was “sneaking” stories into the women’s section where “no one expects anything controversial.” 22 Those were precisely the strategies at St. Paul’s Pioneer Press and Dispatch. Women’s section editor Mary Ann Grossmann pared back the society news to make way for substantive articles about women’s issues. On divisive matters like abortion, she took care to balance the coverage. “I often felt like I was the minefield,” she says. “And this was so under the guys’ radar—the editors’—that they didn’t even pay any attention.” Grossmann assigned reporter Carol Lacey to a women’s movement beat, which gave her both the “contacts” and the “context” for quality reporting. Lacey remembers being the only woman on the floor of the Minnesota Senate when it voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973. “The male reporters came up to me and said, ‘What is this all about?’ How could you not know what this was about? There were women in

the state House, but there were no women in the Senate at the time.” Local feminists learned that the key to media attention was “call Carol Lacey.” Asked if they felt beleaguered by all the requests, both women say simply, “We covered it.”

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN Woman Power Day had neglected some vital issues, including rape, a trauma that women were finally growing bold enough to reveal. Some had never reported rape, knowing that a trial scrutinized the victim’s character and behavior and looked for complicity: whether she had dressed “provocatively,” was sexually active, or ventured out alone. After a rape in uptown Minneapolis in 1971, three women started a rape crisis center in the neighborhood.23 Others followed. Feminist advocates accompanied victims to the hospital and to court and lobbied for public responsibility. In February 1974 three members of the all-male Senate introduced a bill to allocate pilot funds for counseling and medical costs for victims, as well as sensitivity training for police and prosecutors. The bill’s composition shows a feminist hand: It grants authority to voluntary rape-crisis workers to conduct the counseling and training and recommends that people aiding victims be of the same gender. Despite the “sniggering” and “snide remarks” that Nina Rothchild recalls, the bill passed both houses in just over a month. In the House the word “rape” was replaced with “sexual attack,” to switch the onus from victim to perpetrator. Some credit the late Peggy Specktor with this idea, as well as the intense lobbying that won over all but two senators. Specktor became Director of the Minnesota Program for Victims of Sexual Assault.24

One day a constituent notified Representative Linda Berglin about the outcome of her rape charge. She felt that the rapist’s sentence was far too slight for the injury she had suffered. “So I looked into it,” Berglin says, “and discovered the mess we had—archaic laws that would not meet the standards of the day in terms of best practices.” She took the issue to Phyllis Kahn and they agreed to work on it together. “Neither one of us had any law enforcement or criminal justice background.”

State Representative Linda Berglin, about 1973

Ann Alton from the Hennepin County Attorney’s office, who prosecuted rape cases, drew up a graduated schedule of degrees of sexual assault, ranging from unwanted touch to forced penetration. If a jury hesitated to convict on the full charge, they might consider a lesser one. As a measure of the public reluctance to take sexual assault seriously, Berglin tells how her proposal of a mandatory three-year sentence for a second offense horrified some male colleagues who thought her “anti-libertarian.” Nevertheless, the sexual assault bill passed in 1975, with a clause eliminating the complainant’s previous sexual conduct as

a factor in the jury’s decision. It includes Berglin’s second-offense provision but offers an option of treatment for “antisocial sexual behavior.”25 A secret even more suppressed than rape was gradually coming to light: battering. A consciousnessraising group in St. Paul, eager to take on an action project, invited Delores Orey, the only female attorney at Ramsey County Legal Assistance, to talk to them. Orey often got inquiries about legal separation from women who did not want to file for divorce but were looking for a temporary place to stay. She told the group that she could use help answering these calls and finding housing—no easy task, since only one St. Paul shelter, the Grand Hotel, admitted women and children, and it closed in the daytime. The women who called for help often had other needs, as well, so the volunteers held a weekend retreat to talk about putting together a package of services. As Sharon Rice Vaughan remembers it, “a big fight erupted there.” Some in the group saw themselves as “clear-thinking” advisors equipped to tell a woman in crisis what to do. Others believed the woman knew best what she needed and should guide the process. They voted and agreed to ask callers what Summer 2008 69

more they wanted. “That sounds so simple,” Vaughan reflects, “but it was pretty radical.” Having defined their role as advocacy, the women named their group the Women’s Advocates. From then on, when a woman called, “You get your cup of coffee and you’re ready to listen to her. You don’t have to hurry and get off the phone. You find out what it is that’s really going on with her. And that’s when women started talking about being battered.” Learning why so many women needed emergency housing and how vulnerable they were without it set the Women’s Advocates on a campaign for resources. In the meantime, Vaughan took battered women into her home. Within 18 months she housed 115 women and children. Many appeals to local foundations and a pledge drive among feminists finally yielded funds to buy and rehabilitate a flea-ridden former commune on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue. The Women’s Advocates shelter for battered women opened on October 10, 1974, the first in the nation.26 Senator Robert Lewis of St. Louis Park offered to seek state financing if women working on domestic violence would help draft a bill. Phyllis Kahn would be the House sponsor. Passed in 1977, the law established a pilot program of emergency shelters around the state, plus education “to

promote public and professional awareness of the problems of battered women.” 27 Programs for victims of sexual assault and battering were housed in the Department of Corrections, affirming that these were crimes of violence, not relationships gone awry.

Representative Phyllis Kahn at a meeting, about 1975

To be charged as a crime, battering had to be witnessed, and children could not testify. The Domestic Abuse Act of 1979 created a new remedy, the order for protection, which allowed a petitioner to file an affidavit alleging abuse and to ask for relief, including barring the abuser from the premises.28 Vaughan is pleased to have helped secure this change as a member of the legislative committee of the Consortium on Battered Women, where the plan originated. “I think the order for protection is a jurisprudential miracle,” she says, “because it allowed a crime to be charged without having to be proved. Basically it was about believing women. It was about having this institution stand up for women— both the police and the courts.”

ECONOMICS Economic inequities abounded well into the 1970s. Married women could not get credit in their own names 70 Minnesota History

until mid-decade, when federal and state laws declared otherwise. Widows who had farmed with their husbands paid inheritance tax until a tax court exempted half the land. Insurers could refuse maternity benefits to unmarried women until the law was tweaked in 1976. Oversight of these problems and their remedies fell to the Council (later Commission) on the Economic Status of Women, created by the legislature in 1976.29 Nina Rothchild became its first executive director. “There are not many jobs to be a paid feminist,” she laughs. Rothchild had not been employed since before marriage, but she was active in community service and politics. She had been lobbying at the legislature since Charlotte Striebel asked her to testify about girls’ athletics. Her hiring validated volunteerism as legitimate work. The council initiated legislation that both Rothchild and Linda Berglin claim as their proudest achievement: pay equity in government employment. Assistant Director Bonnie Watkins, a founder of the Minnesota group Women in State Employment, shepherded a massive study begun in 1977, using a computer program Charlotte Striebel developed. It surveyed all classes of state employees to compare job descriptions and pay levels with what the jobholder actually did, using “skill, effort, and responsibility” as guidelines. The survey turned up systemic disparities. For example, supervising 20 clerical employees—think female—might pay half as much as supervising 20 maintenance employees. “Everything was so homemade going in front of the legislature,” Nina Rothchild recalls. “I was sitting with my Magic Marker® and making little graphs of women’s jobs and men’s jobs and passing them out.” The State

Employees Pay Equity Act of 1982 named equitable pay “the primary wage-setting consideration for employees of the state of Minnesota.” “It felt so good when I heard afterwards that there were now whole groups of state employees who qualified for mortgages,” Berglin says.30

THE MINNESOTA WOMEN’S MEETING, 1977 In recognition of the United Nations International Women’s Year, marked by a conference in Mexico City in 1975, President Jimmy Carter appointed a commission to plan a national celebration for 1977. Congresswoman Bella Abzug already had legislation underway to fund a grass-roots conference in every state, culminating in a national event. One Minnesotan served on the national commission: Koryne Horbal, then the U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. An outstanding strategist, Horbal supplied behind-the-scenes leadership at both the Minnesota meeting, held in St. Cloud, June 2–5, 1977, and the national meeting in Houston, Texas, November 17–21.31

The weekend in St. Cloud showcased the wide array of issues that Minnesota women were addressing, but it also put the working symbiosis between “nice ladies” and “boat rockers” to the test. The meetings were open to all women, not just femi-

nists, although the mission statement called for equality and full participation “in all aspects of national life.” To broaden the appeal, the term “women’s concerns” substituted for “issues.” The Minnesota meeting was to elect 26 delegates to the Houston conference and contribute resolutions toward a “National Plan of Action for Women” to be adopted there. Secretary of State Joan Growe chaired the project; a paid coordinator, Donna Carlton, was housed in the Commission on the Economic Status of Women.

Growe thought as many as 3,000 women might attend the St. Cloud gathering, but 4,500 showed up. The national commission appointed a diverse and representative Minnesota coordinating committee, which undertook an impressive outreach effort to involve women’s organizations and individuals statewide. Growe thought as many as 3,000 women might attend the St. Cloud gathering, but 4,500 showed up. Planning proceeded, however, under the threat of backlash. Nationwide, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and ultimately successful Stop the ERA campaign, Anita Bryant’s antigay crusade, conservative media mogul Richard Viguerie, and others with an antifeminist agenda prepared to take control of the state meetings. “We knew that there was going to be a big antifeminist contingent coming out of the Catholic Church,” Nina Rothchild remembers. Yet two members of the National Council of Catholic Women, including its vice president, Bette Hillemeier of Olivia, served on the coordinating committee and affirmed its mission. The DFL Feminist

Caucus put out a “vital alert”: “We must not lose the future by default. We must all attend the meeting.” Many feminists arriving in St. Cloud were nevertheless surprised to see buses with the names of Catholic schools pull up and unload women wearing pink buttons that read “Support the Human Life Amendment.” Immediately questions arose: Who truly spoke for women? Did these “pink ladies” count, or were they pawns of a male institution? Vivian Jenkins Nelsen, who had attended the Mexico City conference on behalf of the American Lutheran Church, reflects, “The women’s movement has given short shrift to religion and how it impacts women, except for saying that it’s hierarchical and male-dominated and ain’t it awful. But women of faith have had to find their own way, and we’ve never really figured out how to talk to them, how to engage them, how to respect them, and that pushes them really hard to the other side.” The “other side” at the Minnesota meeting meant antiabortion. Abortion had become a defining feminist issue. It surfaced early, as women’s stories showed that outlawing abortion only shrouded it in hypocrisy and danger. Women of means could find willing doctors or travel in search of laxer laws. Those without underwent “back alley” abortions at the risk of infection, injury, or death. Early arguments for legalization cited health and economic fairness. When the Supreme Court applied a constitutional right of privacy to a woman’s decision to abort in Roe v. Wade in 1973, a rhetorical battle between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” ensued.32 The force of the opposition drove feminists into a defensive stance verging on orthodoxy: The fetus was tissue, not human life, and Summer 2008 71

abortion, a surgical procedure with no emotional overtones. Deviating from those premises seemed like ceding ground and putting the legality of abortion in jeopardy. The Minnesota meeting planners struggled with how to balance pro-life and pro-choice workshops and keep the controversy from derailing the conference. Joan Growe announced the final decision: There would be no workshops on the subject. “The question of abortion, right or wrong, is not going to be discussed.” Paulette Joyer, a 25-year-old member of Feminists for Life, felt silenced. She did not oppose abortion, as some might assume, because her priest told her to or because she wanted to entrap women in domesticity or punish them for their sexuality. Her pro-life stance grew out of a “consistent life ethic” that included opposing capital punishment. “I viewed abortion as an assault on women,” she explains, in that it treated pregnancy as a disease. She was surprised, in the debate after Roe v. Wade, to be branded as antifeminist. Raised in a DFL union family, she thought herself liberal and an independent thinker. Joyer believed that staking reproductive freedom on abortion narrowed

women’s choices. “In a world that was really pro-woman, we would be putting our focus on other alternatives for women—more acceptance that you could have children and still work, you could have children and go to school.” She envisioned a society “more accepting of pregnancy, and especially unmarried pregnancy.” The pro-choice rhetoric troubled her. “People weren’t ‘with child,’ they had ‘products of conception.’ The language just seemed so evil to me—sort of like the military industrial complex.” As a lesbian still in the closet, Joyer felt doubly silenced. “I was afraid that if my parents found out, they would die,” she explains. She attended the Houston conference on an “official observer” pass from Congressman Jim Oberstar and enjoyed the greater diversity there. “I wanted there to be a position that incorporated what I believed a real feminism would be. I wanted to be pro-life and I wanted to be feminist and I wanted to be lesbian.” In retrospect, the common ground between Joyer’s concerns and my vision of what else “reproductive choice” might encompass becomes apparent. But distrust—even demonization—made conversation in St. Cloud impossible. The abortion controversy became the elephant in the living room and dominated media reports, except for Carol Lacey’s coverage. Yet this is not

everyone’s overriding memory. Nancy Wangen recalls, “I was so into the notion of how many people showed up, and what diversity there was among them, and being so excited by the events that I don’t remember the specifics. I worked so much alone, or in groups that didn’t agree with me, and here were people who wanted the same things I did.” Minneapolis Tribune reporter Lori Sturdevant distinguished between the lively, crowded workshops—“a positive but diverse educational experience”—and the plenary sessions, which drew fewer registrants and resembled a political convention.33 The 210 workshops, organized by Julie Andrzejewski of St. Cloud, offered discussion and a chance to propose resolutions for the Houston meeting. The schoolbus women spoke in opposition at workshops on sexuality, contraception, and lesbian concerns, but otherwise seemed to go with the flow. Sharon Rice Vaughan remembers that many attended the workshops on battered women and helped turn out unanimous resolutions of support. “Nobody had told them how to vote on that,” she says. “It was amazing. I was so impressed by the enormity of the problem and the power of women’s voices together in these votes.” In the plenary sessions, resolutions were formally adopted and delegates to Houston elected. Here the Catholic women were told how to vote, by spotters in the balcony who held up green and red cards. Feminists were instructed behind the scenes.34 A culture clash broke out at the plenaries on Saturday night and Sunday morning. A bipartisan team of cochairs and a parliamentarian

The internet holds many documents of women’s history. For an overview and Minnesota-specific resources from both sides of the abortion debate, see www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/96choicelife.html. 72 Minnesota History

kept a tight rein on procedure, often declaring speakers unfamiliar with the rules out of order. The airing of resolutions had barely begun when a trio of DFL activists moved, in succession, to accept “items 12–43” as a bloc, to close debate, and to adjourn the session. The items in question were resolutions prepared in advance by the national commission and Minnesota “topic coordinators.” Item 23 began, “Moral decisions related to reproduction are rightfully the responsibility of individual women.”

The idea that feminists would conduct a win-lose contest alienated women used to talking their way to consensus. Abortion was supposed to be off the table, but the vote put the Minnesota meeting on record as pro-choice. Paulette Joyer, for one, would like to have registered a dissent on that item and voted in favor of others. Women accustomed to party conventions thought the move efficient, but others objected. Cochair Kay Taylor explained, “Whenever there is any kind of a contest, there are winners and there are losers.” The idea that feminists would conduct a win-lose contest alienated women used to talking their way to consensus, even though many of us voted “yes” for fear of backlash. Jackie Joday of Willmar, elected a delegate to Houston, remembers feeling exhausted by all the politicking. She didn’t think women would behave so much like men.35 Sunday morning, about 40 of the “minority women” stated their grievance with the process and walked out. Karen Sterner spoke for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Caucus: “We feel this entire meeting is

being dominated by white females and all of the motion that has taken place this morning regarding rules and regulations, etc., is just a waste of time.” Nina Rothchild was disappointed: “My experience of the women’s movement is that everybody was leaning over backwards to try to be inclusive. I’ve never known just what the issue was. All I’ve ever heard was, ‘You don’t deal with our issues.’ Don’t tell me that poverty and welfare and childcare and healthcare are not issues for women of color.” 36 Vivian Jenkins Nelsen was not present at the time of the walkout, but she remembers “doing a lot of talk and strategizing in hallways and rooms, trying to head off the inevitable.” She attributes the walkout to “a lack of relationship and a lack of understanding about what women of color had to go through to even be there, and the price that we pay to be a part of that.” As an example of the difficulty balancing loyalties to race and gender, Nelsen cites the awkward moment when, as president of WEAL, she presented discrimination complaints to Harry Davis, the first black chair of the Minneapolis school board. The black community was celebrating his achievement, and her sour note was not appreciated. “What kind of value did we add to the women’s movement? That was the question that we were having to answer to our constituencies, back in our communities. I’m a part of this because? White women tolerate me? That didn’t play. I think the fact that white women and women of color didn’t know each other’s stories was a large part of it.” Women of color certainly did add value in Houston, by composing a Minority Women’s Plank of resolutions. Its unanimous acceptance signaled a shift from token inclusion to vital influence.

One glorious moment in St. Cloud has become a unifying memory. Governor Rudy Perpich had promised to name a woman to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and in a speech at his son’s Hibbing High School graduation on Friday, he announced the appointment of Rosalie E. Wahl. She was at the women’s meeting. Cheers rang out as she walked to the podium to speak. “Her speech was incredible,” Gerri Perreault recalls. “It warmed your heart to sit there and hear it.” Emily Anne Staples Tuttle calls the moment “a euphoric high.” Paulette Joyer, now an attorney, remembers “taking great pride” in Wahl’s appointment. “That was huge,” she says.

Rosalie Wahl, associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, 1978

EMPLOYMENT AGAIN One more drama had yet to play out. Before Jackie Joday left for Houston, she packed a five-page paper headed “WBEA FACT SHEET: WILL SEXISM IN BANKING TRIUMPH?” 37 She was to hand it to Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. It told about nine female employees of the Citizen’s National Bank of Willmar who had filed charges with the EEOC on November 10, 1976. The bank had hired a man with no experience to work Summer 2008 73

in the loan department for $700 per month. The position was neither posted nor offered to any qualified female employees, who were paid less yet required to train the new man. The bank refused to comply with the remedies the EEOC prescribed and instead found ways to retaliate. So the women formed a “mini-union” and took their case to the National Labor Relations Board. “This is a battle the women’s movement cannot afford to lose,” the paper maintains. “Unless the salaries of women having the brains and skills necessary to handle enormous sums of money are properly compensated, the pattern of employment— women in poor positions or grossly underpaid in responsible ones—will continue, for banks set the standards for all others.” On December 16, 1977, eight women—Doris Boshart, Irene Wallin, Sylvia Erickson Koll, Jane Harguth Groothuis, Sandi Treml, Teren Novotny, Shirley Solyntjes, and Glennis Ter Wisscha—went out on strike. “We had just come back from Houston,” Mary Ann Grossmann recalls, “and this woman called me at some ungodly hour of the morning and said, ‘Some women in Willmar are going on strike,’ and I thought, What? Nobody on the city desk would have possibly cared then about women going on strike. So the photographer and I went up there on one of the coldest days of the year. We left at 5:30 in the morning. It was pitch dark.” National coverage soon followed. “The press loved it because it was so cold,” Grossmann says. “It was one of the coldest winters, and the women had their big mufflers, and they had children with them sometimes. For people from California and Florida to see these huge mounds . . .” 74 Minnesota History

The strike continued for 18 months. Although some of the strikers were initially wary of feminists, they became darlings of the women’s movement. Director Lee Grant filmed a documentary, The Willmar Eight, that is still shown in women’s studies classes. Yet in the end they lost their NLRB appeal and their jobs. Only Boshart was hired back, with a demotion.

From the late 1960s onward, feminists around the country looked to Minnesota as a model of progress. “The thing that I wish we had been able to cover more is that this was as much a class struggle as a women’s struggle,” Grossmann says. “We obviously had to focus on the women part of it because they were women and this was a first, but looking back on it now, I can tell there’s a real sociological issue, because these were the town women up against the banker and the country club set.” Class remained, for Minnesota feminists, an unexplored frontier. A new term, “the feminization of poverty,” had just entered the American vocabulary.38

From the late 1960s onward, feminists around the country looked to Minnesota as a model of progress. We who attended national conferences seeking better ideas were surprised to hear our efforts—both legislative and countercultural— lauded as exemplary. Outside observers knew Minnesota as “a state that works,” the headline article in the August 13, 1973, issue of Time, which featured Governor Wendell Ander-

son on the cover. Minnesota worked for women in part because feminist reforms fit liberal concepts of the role of government in social change. From 1973 to 1978, the DFL held wide margins in both houses of the legislature, plus the governorship.39 Republican legislators were moderate on many issues. Despite some initial awkwardness—whenever anyone addressed the House as “gentlemen,” the women took turns calling a point of order—the female legislators generally felt welcomed. Phyllis Kahn remembers Republican Bob Bell saying, “I can’t believe these awful things I’m voting for, but you’re all so earnest and you’re trying so hard.” The conservative turn the country took with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 dampened feminists’ heady sense of possibility. But significant change had been accomplished—and valuable lessons learned, as Gerri Perreault realized years later. “I learned how to organize, how to anticipate differences no matter what the group is and work with differences, how to be prepared and cautious with the media, and how arbitrary the justice system could be.” She discovered that precedents don’t always hold, although change is generally cumulative. We have all learned, too, how quickly a time of such fervor and accomplishment slips into the deep recesses of history if we do not work to keep it in view. “The bad news in the younger generation,” says Nina Rothchild, “is that they don’t see the relevance of the women’s movement, but the good news is that they take it for granted that they can have an equal opportunity, and they’re probably going to make a fuss if they don’t.” Nancy Wangen adds, “Sometimes it’s important to remember how bad it was as we think about how much better it still needs to be.”  a

N otes 1. Minnesota Statute 363, was amended in 1969 to prohibit sex discrimination in employment; www.humanrights.mn.us/ sonline11/legalhistory.html (accessed Mar. 24, 2008). 2. Phyllis Kahn, “More Important than the Midi: Star and Trib Fashion Show Action,” Female Liberation Newsletter 18 (Oct. 1970), n.p. The article incorrectly dates the protest as December 19; a prior issue announced it for September. The newsletter was mimeographed and stapled monthly or biweekly from November 1969 through November 1971 by the Twin Cities Female Liberation Group, a loosely structured gathering of women, many with ties to the antiwar movement. Issues cited are in the author’s collection; an incomplete set is in the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), St. Paul. 3. Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 61–97. Senator Muriel Humphrey was appointed to serve out the remaining months of her husband’s term following his death. 4. Minnesota Department of Human Rights, Division of Women’s Affairs Records, Minnesota State Archives, MHS (hereinafter Women’s Affairs records). 5. Nina Rothchild, interview with author, Oct. 2, 2007. All interviews for this article were completed between September 5, 2007, and January 25, 2008, and all transcripts are at MHS. Unless noted otherwise, quotes from and references to these women come from these interviews. 6. Kahn says that the EEOC phoned her yearly to discuss her complaint then refiled it. In 1982, after she had left the university and the Rajender case (below) had brought academic discrimination into the spotlight, she won a lesser financial settlement than she had sought. 7. Arvonne Fraser, She’s No Lady: Politics, Family, and International Feminism (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 2007), 150–54. 8. See Office for University Women website: www1.umn.edu/women/history.htm (accessed Mar. 25, 2008). 9. Perreault went to court in 1971 to take back her maiden name while still married. The first judge she queried told her, “It’s just not sound social policy.” Judge Douglas Amdahl granted the change, explaining, “If movie stars can do it, I don’t see why you can’t.” In April 1975 the legislature passed a bill decreeing that “no application [for a name change] shall be denied on the basis of the marital status of the applicant,” Laws of Minnesota, 1975, Ch. 52, p. 266–68. Since 1975, all marriage-license applicants in Minnesota must declare a “name after marriage.”

10. Ann Saxenmeyer, Mary Sornsin, and Audrey Van Deren were the cofounders. Several more women joined the effort later. 11. Reprinted in Emma Willard Task Force on Education, Sexism in Education (Minneapolis, 1971), copy in the Emma Willard Task Force on Education Records, MHS. 12. Sex Bias Task Force file, Women’s Affairs records. 13. Laws of Minnesota, 1975, Ch. 173, p. 502–03. For characterizations, see Barbara J. Love, ed. Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 477. 14. Women’s Day was organized by the Women’s Advisory Committee and announced in the Female Liberation Newsletter, no. 21, undated. 15. Fraser, She’s No Lady, 157. 16. Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus Records, MHS; Linda Wiehoff and Jane Stedman, “Minnesota Feminist Caucus Sets Up Steering Committee,” Goldflower 1 (Dec. 1971/Jan. 1972): 5, 11, author’s collection. 17. DFL Feminist Caucus Records; Ann O’Loughlin Papers—both MHS. 18. Staples was the second woman in the Senate. Republican Nancy Brataas had won a special election in 1975. 19. Tom Brokaw, Boom! Voices of the Sixties (New York: Random House, 2007), 210–14. 20. Bonnie Watkins and Nina Rothchild, In the Company of Women: Voices from the Women’s Movement (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1996), 122–23. 21. Laws of Minnesota, 1975, Ch. 338, p. 985–86. 22. Molly Ivins, “Reporting on the Women’s Caucus at the National Meeting of Dissident Overground Journalists, April 18–19,” Female Liberation Newsletter 15 (Aug. 12, 1970), n.p. 23. Cheryl Ann Champion, “The Evolution of Organizational Structure in the Rape Crisis Movement in Minnesota from 1970–1990,” (Master’s thesis, Augsburg College, 1994), 38, copy in MHS. 24. Minnesota, Journal of the Senate, 1974, vol. 3, p. 4323, and Journal of the House, 1974, vol. 4, p. 6737–38; Laws of Minnesota, 1974, Ch. 578, p. 1439; Love, Feminists, 436. The three senators were Allan Spear, William Kirchner, and Sam Solon. 25. Laws of Minnesota, 1975, Ch. 374, p. 1243–51. See also Linda Lee Berglin, Legislative Files 1972–78, MHS. 26. Evans, Tidal Wave, 49; Rothchild and Watkins, Company of Women, 67–72. 27. Laws of Minnesota, 1977, Ch. 428, p. 1096–1100.

28. Laws of Minnesota, 1979, Ch. 214, p. 414–17. 29. The federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, and Minnesota added “marital status” to its Human Rights Act in 1975; Laws of Minnesota, 1975, Ch. 206, Subd. 8, p. 611; Council on the Economic Status of Women, A Woman’s Place: A Guide to Women’s Legal and Economic Rights in Minnesota (St. Paul, 1978), copy in MHS; Laws of Minnesota, 1976, Ch. 121, p. 275–79, and Ch. 337, p. 1343–44. 30. Sara M. Evans and Barbara J. Nelson, Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3. Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed Rothchild to head the Department of Employee Relations in 1983, and Bonnie Watkins joined that department as pay equity coordinator. Most of the work of implementing pay equity, in local governments as well, was done in the 1980s. 31. Evans, Tidal Wave, 111–12; Minnesota Women’s Meeting Records, MHS. For documents pertaining to the 1977 state and national meetings, see http://womhist. alexanderstreet.com/dp59/doclist.htm (accessed Mar. 25, 2008). 32. Minnesota repealed its prohibition in March 1974 and specified that abortion be done by a physician in a hospital or abortion facility during the first trimester of pregnancy; Laws of Minnesota, 1974, Ch. 177, p. 265. 33. Minneapolis Tribune, June 6, 1977, 1B. 34. Minneapolis Star, June 4, 1977, 1A. 35. Author’s conversation with Jackie Joday at “Women’s Dreams, 1977–2007 and Beyond: A Minnesota Women’s Consortium Conference,” University of Minnesota Continuing Education Center, St. Paul, Nov. 15, 2007. 36. Transcript of plenary session, Minnesota Women’s Meeting Records. Minnesota’s female population in 1970 was 98.2% white; in 1980, 96.6% white, possibly including some “Spanish language persons.” U.S., Census, General Population Characteristics, Part 25: Minnesota, 1980, p. 25, (1900–80 totals). 37. Here and below, typescript, in author’s possession, supplied by Jackie Joday. 38. The term was coined by Diana Pearce in her 1978 social-work scholarship. 39. On DFL majorities, see “Party control,” www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/histleg/ histdat.asp (accessed Mar. 25, 2008).

All illustrations are in MHS collections. The photo on p. 63 is by Powell Krueger/Minneapolis Tribune; p. 66, top, Eugene D. Becker; and p. 73, Kathy Drozen. All object photographs are by Eric Mortenson/MHS. Summer 2008 75

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